Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
Comparisons
between any modern-day political figure and Adolf Hitler have become decidedly
unfashionable. Michael Lind pote Politico
post from March 8 called “Quit Comparing Trump to Hitler!” (http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/03/trump-hitler-comparisons-213711)
that essentially said people who did that were making Trump seem decidedly
worse than he really is. Like others who have questioned the validity of any
comparison between the New York developer and the Nazi Führer, Lind
trotted out George Orwell’s quote from 1946 — just after his native Britain and
its allies had beaten the real Nazis at a terrible cost in blood and wealth —
that “the word ‘fascism’ has now no meaning except in so far as it
signifies ‘something not desirable’.” (By the early 1950’s that would be true,
at least in the U.S., of “socialism” as well.)
Hitler
comparisons are designed not to facilitate rational debate, but to
short-circuit it. Anyone who compares a political opponent to Hitler is saying
that this person is so evil we can’t even
afford to take their ideas seriously, much less let them anywhere near political
power. So I don’t make the comparison lightly, but after watching a good deal
of the Republican convention in Cleveland July 18-21 I couldn’t help but be
reminded of Leni Riefenstahl’s film Triumph of the Will. Made in 1934 at the Sixth Nazi Party Congress in
Nuremberg, Germany, Triumph of the Will is one of the two greatest Right-wing propaganda films ever made (D.
W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation
from 1915 is the other) and a movie that still chills today not only because it
was made under Nazi auspices but because it shows them as they wanted us to see them.
Riefenstahl was
relatively uninterested in what the Nazis actually had to say. What attracted
her to them was they had promised to end the destructive partisan feuding and
street violence that had sandbagged Germany’s previous attempt at democracy,
the Weimar Republic of 1918-1932. Throughout her film she surrounds Hitler with
a godlike aura as thousands of young men, marching in strict formation and
looking as much alike as possible, pay tribute to him en masse. Like many of Hitler’s supporters, she responded to
his portrayal of himself as “a man of destiny,” an embodiment of Germany’s
“racial will” and someone uniquely suited to overcome the humiliation of losing
World War I and having the “hard peace” of Versailles imposed on it. Though he
may not have used these exact words, virtually every piece of rhetoric out of
Hitler’s mouth was a promise to end the influence of Jews and others he
considered evil, and single-handedly “make Germany great again.”
What I saw
during the Republican convention seemed in many particulars — especially when
Trump was giving his 78-minute acceptance speech and the hall, half full at
best on previous nights, was packed — like a remake of Triumph of the Will. Of course, there were obvious differences. The
C-SPAN cameras were being positioned by functional directors instead of a
visionary filmmaking genius like Riefenstahl. We were also seeing the event in
real time instead of two years later (Triumph of the Will, filmed in 1934, wasn’t released until 1936 because
Riefenstahl spent that long on post-production).
But what we were
seeing — and, even more, what we were hearing, especially from the seemingly
endless procession of speakers named Trump, not only the man himself but
virtually all his adult children — sounded themes that were totalitarian in
general and Nazi in particular, notably the cult of personality consciously
being built around Trump and the sense that he, personally — not anything he
stood for or said he would do — was being presented as America’s one and only
chance for salvation. As Trump himself said, during a speech that was mostly a
description of hell on earth and a presentation of him as the only person who
can bring it salvation, “I alone can fix it.”
While Left-wing
dictators — Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Chávez — have also built cults of
personality around themselves, it is the Right’s totalitarians who have
presented themselves as literally the embodiment of the state they intend to
govern. This goes back even farther than King Louis XIV of France, who famously
said, “L’etat, c’est moi” — “I am the
state.” As German scholar Michael Rademacher argues in an essay comparing the
Nazis to the fictitious state of Oceania in George Orwell’s novel 1984 (http://www.verwaltungsgeschichte.de/hitler.html),
“Hitler was not only presented by Nazi propaganda as a ‘savior,’ from reading
[Hitler’s book] Mein Kampf one
can get the impression that Hitler indeed thought of himself as a Christ-like
savior figure.”
It’s this
overlay of quasi-religious belief and fervor that marks the Right-wing dictator
and sets him (and it’s almost always a him, not a her) apart from totalitarians
of the Left. In his convention speech, again and again Donald Trump presented
himself as a unique authority figure, one whom the universe had brought into
being because his country was so beset by existential crises only someone with his unique set of powers and gifts can
make things right. As Carl Martz of Redlands mentioned in a letter published in
the July 23 Los Angeles Times (http://www.latimes.com/opinion/readersreact/la-ol-le-donald-trump-speech-readers-20160723-snap-story.html),
“There was one glaring omission in Trump’s speech: He never mentioned
Congress.”
Ironically,
given how many of the other speakers at the Republican convention condemned
President Obama for governing by executive order instead of asking Congress to
approve his actions, Trump presented his presidency as a sort of plebiscitary
dictatorship in which, once elected, he can do just about anything he likes.
Trump offered himself to the nation not as a democratically elected leader,
subject to the limitations of a Constitution of which Trump is so ignorant he
doesn’t know how many articles it has, but as a Führer. As Martz put it, “He seemed to view American
government as consisting of the president with unlimited powers and Supreme
Court justices whom he will control. Congress? Democrats? Compromise?
Filibusters? It’s as if they do not exist.”
And the cult of
personality Trump has created around himself is echoed in the way his most
loyal, committed supporters feel about him. In a June 21 Los Angeles Times article called “The Church of Trump” (http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-manseau-trump-religious-movement-20160621-snap-story.html),
Peter Manseau argued, “The appeal of Trumpism for some Christians, as well as
for many who claim no faith at all, might be that it functions as something
like a religion in its own right. Indeed, if we consider his movement as
fundamentally religious, in the broad sense of the term, rather than strictly
political, his otherwise surprising success begins to make a lot of sense.”
Manseau cited
French philosopher and sociologist Émile Durkheim (1857-1917), who preceded
both Hitler’s and Trump’s movements but predicted a lot about them and their
faith-based appeals. Durkheim argued that religion, in the broader sense, was a
system of beliefs and practices that united a community by bringing it a sense
of “collective effervescence” which “often reaches
such a point that it causes unheard-of actions. … The passions released are of
such an impetuosity that they can be restrained by nothing.”
“That Trump sees the world starkly in terms of winners
and losers has become shorthand for his simplistic thinking, but as he uses
these terms they also map neatly onto Durkheim’s categories,” Manseau argued.
“He gives his followers access to the sacred — winning — while offering
protection from the profane influence of Muslims, Mexicans and low-energy
losers.” And though Manseau carefully avoided making the Hitler-Trump
comparison, giving his followers “access to the sacred — winning” was what
Hitler did, too.
As Hitler himself put it, “The greatness of every
mighty organization embodying an idea in this world lies in the religious
fanaticism and intolerance with which, fanatically convinced of its own right,
it intolerantly imposes its will against all others.” And like Trump’s,
Hitler’s drama had not only its hero — himself — but also its villains from
whose “profane influence” he would offer his followers protection: Communists,
Gypsies, Queers and, above all, Jews.
Hillary Clinton as the
Wicked Witch
Besides such
broad scapegoat groups as Muslims, Mexicans and “low-energy losers,” Trump’s
convention offered the faithful a Satan figure in the person of his principal
political opponent, Hillary Rodham Clinton. It’s indicative of how much the
appeal of this year’s Republican party is fascistic rather than democratic in
nature that the speakers seemed to spend more time demonizing Hillary Clinton
than praising Donald Trump. More than one commentator on the convention noted
that the only people who seemed to be saying positive things about Trump — not
just negative things about Clinton — were Trump’s kids.
And what’s more,
just as the arguments for Trump at the convention were framed not in terms of
anything he would do about specific issues facing the U.S. but on the sheer
force of his personality, so were the arguments against Clinton. They were less
about what she would do as President than about who she is. Part of this was
just smart politics — the polls about Clinton show that a majority of Americans
regard her as competent but an even larger majority simply don’t trust her —
but it seems also an inextricable part of the heroic mythos with which Trump is
surrounding himself that his villain, too, must be larger than life. Just as Beowulf
needed Grendel, St. George needed the dragon, Siegfried needed Fafner, Frodo
Baggins needed Sauron and Saruman and Luke Skywalker needed Darth Vader, so
Trump the avenging hero, the redeemer, needs to imbue his villain with equally
far-reaching power so his final triumph over her will have the mythic power it
needs to justify setting aside American republican democracy and replacing it
with the Rule of Trump.
In Hillary
Clinton, Trump has lucked out big-time. Both she and her husband have been hate
objects for America’s Right for so long Trump and his surrogates don’t have to
do much bell-ringing to get the rank-and-file of the Republican Party to drool
over the prospect of her vanquishment. I’ve pointed out several times before in
these pages that the American Right once literally depicted Hillary as a witch (a crude caricature of
her looking like the stereotypical wicked witch used to adorn the subscription
solicitations of the American Spectator magazine). More recently, at the Republican convention Ben Carson, one
of Trump’s former opponents, accused Hillary Clinton of being in league with
Lucifer (a.k.a. Satan, a.k.a. the Devil) because she’d written her 1969 college
thesis on community organizer Saul Alinsky, and in 1971 (two years after Hillary wrote about him) Alinsky published the book Rules
for Radicals in which he wrote, “The first radical known to man who rebelled against the
establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom —
Lucifer.”
Hillary is hated
by the Trump faithful both for who she is and what she’s done. Who she is: an
independent woman who made her own career and was so uninterested in being an
appendage to her husband that for a time she tried to establish herself under
her original last name, Rodham, instead of using his. A woman who came to the
White House with her husband, was given control over his health-care reform
program (“Before it was called Obamacare, it was called Hillarycare,” she said
over and over during the Democratic primary debates, thereby associating
herself with an earlier, failed attempt to accomplish what’s probably the most
viscerally hated program of Obama’s administration), and who after Bill Clinton
left office ran for Senator from New York, then got appointed Secretary of
State and tried to encroach on the all-male preserve of the Presidency … twice.
And what she’s
done: instead of questioning her on policy issues or her ties to Wall Street,
the case against Hillary Clinton at the Republican convention was based on a
foul stew of conspiracy theories the Right has been cooking since her husband’s
presidency: the “murder” of Vincent Foster, her alleged “enabling” of her
husband’s adulteries, the attack on the U.S. embassy in Benghazi, Libya and,
above all, the e-mails. One of the lowest points of the convention was when the
widow of one of the four diplomats killed at Benghazi said, “Hillary Clinton,
how could you do this to my husband?” — as if Hillary had pulled a gun on him
and shot him herself.
As for the
e-mails, like Clinton’s principal rival for the Democratic nomination, Bernie
Sanders, I’m sick and tired of hearing about Hillary Clinton’s e-mails. Trump
raised a legitimate point against her when he pointed out in his speech that
before she turned over 30,000 e-mails she’d sent with her private server while
U.S. Secretary of State, she and her staff unilaterally deleted 33,000 of them
on the ground that they were “personal,” with no independent third-party
verification of whether they were actually personal or whether some of them may
have contained government information.
And I think FBI
director James Comey got it right on both counts when he announced that he was
not going to seek an indictment against her but her handling of classified
information had been “extremely careless.” Those are words a more responsible
Republican Party could legitimately use to undermine one of Hillary’s principal
arguments for herself: that because of her long record of government service as
well as her previous status as First Lady she’s well prepared for the
Presidency and would be far more competent in the office than her opponent.
But this year’s
Republican Party — and this is one respect in which the Trumpified Republicans
of this year are not fundamentally
different from the Republicans of the last quarter-century — is not inclined to
make rational arguments about much of anything, especially about the Clintons. The Republicans have regarded
Bill and Hillary Clinton as founts of political evil ever since Bill emerged as
a Presidential contender in the early 1990’s. David Brock, former Right-wing
hatchet man who now runs a pro-Hillary super-PAC, wrote in his book Blinded
by the Right that “when Hillary Clinton
said there was a vast Right-wing conspiracy to get her and her husband, I knew
she was right — because I was part of it.”
The American
Spectator magazine — the one that was
drumming up subscriptions by sending out mailings adorned with a picture of
Hillary as a witch — was funded by a multi-millionaire named Richard Mellon
Scaife who also underwrote something called “The Arkansas Project.” This was an
attempt to dig up as much dirt on the Clintons as possible, and in practice it
uncovered just about everyone in Arkansas who had a grudge against the Clintons
and had some derogatory information about them — or, if they didn’t, were
willing to make some up.
The result was
to make Bill Clinton only the second U.S. President in history to be impeached
by the House of Representatives and put on trial in the Senate. The first,
Andrew Johnson, was impeached and tried in 1868 for reasons that at least made
logical sense: he had done his damnedest to sabotage Congressional
Reconstruction and keep African-Americans as virtual slaves. The best they
could come up with against Bill Clinton was that he’d had sex with a White
House aide and had ham-handedly and ineptly lied about it.
The venom with
which Hillary Clinton was attacked at this year’s Republican convention — not
only the chants of “Lock her up!” but the preposterous “indictment” read
against her by New Jersey Governor Chris Christie (who, as a former prosecutor,
should know better) and the call-and-response cries of “Guilty!” he got from
his audience — makes it seem virtually certain that if she’s elected she will
be the third President who will be impeached.
And if she isn’t elected, Donald
Trump will move heaven and earth to make sure she’s indicted for the e-mails
and whatever else he can dream up, no matter how much violence he has to do to
the Constitution and its guarantees of due process and the presumption of
innocence to put her behind bars.
White Restoration:
Trump’s Deeper Racism and Sexism
Donald Trump has
often been called racist and sexist, but most people who’ve used those terms
for him have focused only on the most superficial manifestations of those
attitudes. His now-infamous statement that undocumented Mexican immigrants were
“bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists” got him slammed by
progressive activists and the mainstream media — which, paradoxically, only fed
his supporters’ image of him as a man who can be counted out to tell the
“truth,” however much it may be “politically incorrect.” So did his attack on
Megyn Kelly of Fox News, who in one debate asked Trump about insulting
statements he’s made about women and ended up on the receiving end of a Trump
insult directed against her as a woman: that she had “blood coming out of her
eyes, or her wherever.” (One would think a man who’s had three wives and five
children wouldn’t be so appallingly ignorant about how women’s bodies work.)
But Trump’s
superficial attacks on women, people of color, people with disabilities and
others he considers “weak” are just the tip of the iceberg. It’s revealing that
before he ran for President in 2016 his principal political effort was promoting
the so-called “Birther” myth that President Obama was born not in Hawai’i but
in Kenya, and was therefore ineligible for the presidency under the
constitutional requirement that the President be “a natural born Citizen.” More
recently, he’s referred to the judge in the case against Trump University,
Gonzalo Curiel, as “a Mexican” and said that by that fact alone he is incapable
of presiding over the case impartially (though he hasn’t asked his attorneys to
file a motion to disqualify the judge for cause), and he referred to the
alleged shooter in Orlando, Florida, Omar Mateen, as “an Afghan” — even though
both Curiel and Mateen were born in the U.S. and it was their parents who came here from Mexico and Afghanistan,
respectively.
What that
suggests is that Donald J. Trump, in his heart of hearts, simply does not
believe that people of color can ever be real Americans. He’s added a mental
footnote to the Constitution that says only white people can be true,
first-class citizens. His attitude would move the U.S. away from its historic
position that you gain American citizenship through coming here, working hard
and joining the American community. Instead Trump’s ideas would impose a “blood
citizenship” requirement similar to that which bedevils Trump’s own ancestral
homeland, Germany, where immigrants from Turkey and elsewhere whose families
have been in Germany for generations can’t become German citizens — while
people of German ancestry whose families haven’t seen German soil in decades
can become instant “Germans” just by moving there and establishing residency.
Trump’s racism
is deeper than most people realize, and it’s fitted him to become what he is in
the upcoming election: the candidate of white male restoration. So is his
sexism: his defense against the charge that he hates women is to point to the
women who are in positions of power in his business organization. This suggests
that Trump has use for women only if
they fit one of two categories: either they can make him richer, in which case
he hires them to do just that; or he would want to have sex with them, and they
with him, in which case he … well, he used to boast of his prowess as a cocksman and an impressive list of
“conquests,” until it dawned even through his thick skull that a man who publicly
boasted of his adulteries just might have a hard time being taken seriously by
the self-proclaimed party of “family values.”
I vividly
remember when the Republican Party regained control of the U.S. House of
Representatives in the 2010 election, and the sense of relief many Republican
officials showed when interviewed by the media. They had been forced for the
previous four years to see the “People’s House” governed by a woman, Nancy Pelosi, Democrat from San Francisco, and
there was a sense among Republicans not only that they had regained the House
majority but that the proper order of the universe would be restored when a
white male, John Boehner, got the usurping Pelosi out of there and took his
place at the head of the House. Likewise, if Trump wins, a lot of his supporters and Republicans in general will
feel that the proper order of the universe has been restored by having a white
man in the White House instead of that, ugh, whatever Obama was.
And if Trump
loses, their sense of grievance will only be intensified by seeing the Black
man step out of the Oval Office … and a woman replace him. It’s not just that Hillary is a Clinton, wife of one of
the most thoroughly demonized Presidents in U.S. history and herself such a
long-term target of abuse that after this year’s Republican convention a
20-year-old article called “Hating Hillary” got so many hits it soared to the
top of the New Yorker’s Web site.
It’s the mere fact of her femaleness.
The root of
Donald Trump’s support lies among white men, and in particular working-class
white men who didn’t go to college because, when they came of age, they didn’t
need to. Many of them had decent-paying blue-collar jobs available to them,
often in company towns where once you were out of high school, you could stop
at the employment office on Friday and be told, “You start Monday.” Ironically,
given their former holders’ current politics, those decent-paying blue-collar
jobs existed because of decades of progressive organizing that had won those
workers union representation, minimum wages, laws to protect their health and
safety, relatively high wages and good benefits, including health coverage.
For about 25
years of American history, between the end of World War II and the recession of
the early 1970’s, a relative degree of labor peace existed in the U.S. Many
large corporations were run by people who grudgingly realized that capitalism
could be a win-win-win situation: companies made quality products and paid
their workers enough to be able to afford them; consumers had access to
reliable, durable goods; and investors profited through keeping their stock in
healthy companies and reaping their rewards as dividend payments.
Then attitudes
hardened, especially among the 1 percent. In the early 1970’s corporate leaders
got the idea that they had been short-changed in the economic transformations
wrought by the 1930’s Depression and World War II. Also a new school of
economists, headed by Milton Friedman of the University of Chicago, proclaimed
that “maximizing shareholder value” was the sole purpose of corporate
governance, and any suggestion that executives had responsibilities to anyone
else — their workers, their consumers, their communities — was “socialism.”
At the same time
capitalism was evolving the way Karl Marx said it would; as it became harder to
maintain the same level of profits, companies responded by merging. Fewer
companies meant less competition — less of the “invisible hand” that was
supposed to keep capitalism honest — and it also led to a bewildering maze of
holding companies and hedge funds that bought large corporations and used them
essentially as gambling chips.
If they could
make money by keeping the businesses going and the workers employed, they
would. If they could make even more money by closing down U.S. factories and
relocating them overseas where wages were a fraction of what American workers
expected — and there was no government-required nonsense about protecting
workers’ health and safety, or maintaining the environment — they’d do that,
too. If the all-important maximization of shareholder value meant closing down
huge businesses and selling the remains piece by piece, they’d do that, too.
American workers
found themselves in a bind not that different from the one German workers had
been put in by the economy-destroying reparations payments imposed on Germany
by the victorious Allies in World War I and the destructive policies the German
government pursued to keep their economy going — including the horrendous
hyperinflation of 1922-23. They were told over and over that they couldn’t
expect to live as well as they once had, and their children couldn’t expect to
live as well as their parents had. And, by the German Right in general and the
Nazis in particular, they were told who they could blame for that.
The Jews. Jewish
capitalists had, Nazi propagandists said, wantonly destroyed the German
economy. Jewish Communists had fomented phony revolutions to make the plight of
the workers even worse. If anybody asked a Nazi how the Jews could be both the
capitalists and the Communists who were ostensibly their sworn enemies, the
Nazi would say, “They’re Jews. They
destroy things. That’s what they do.” The Nazis not only sold this bill of
goods to the German people, they believed in it themselves enough that they set
out to rid the world of Jews, continuing the Holocaust even when the resources
expended on killing Jews hurt the German war effort and contributed to their
ultimate defeat in World War II.
It doesn’t take
much analytical skill to perceive the similarities between the way Adolf Hitler
talked about the Jews and the way Donald Trump talks about Mexicans and
Muslims. And Trump has one advantage over Hitler. Whereas Hitler’s people had
to fake the “Jewish atrocities” that supposedly justified the Holocaust, Trump
can point to real people all over the world — in New York and Washington, D.C.
on 9/11; in Boston, San Bernardino, Orlando, Paris, Nice, Munich — who have
been murdered in cold blood by terrorists proclaiming themselves as agents of
Islam.
Hence the
apocalyptic fervor with which Trump spoke to the Republican convention on July
21. Hence the grimness on his face as he delivered his speech and the fierce
scowl which he interrupted just to the minimum degree necessary to be able to talk
at all. In the August 2016 Harper’s (http://harpers.org/archive/2016/08/don-the-realtor/),
Martin Amis published a comparative review of Trump’s first book, The
Art of the Deal (co-written with Tony
Schwartz, who gave an interview to The New Yorker about the experience: see http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/donald-trumps-ghostwriter-tells-all),
and his latest, Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again, which revealed that the grim, non-smiling
countenance of Trump’s face was no accident. As Amis put it:
“Some readers,” writes Trump sternly in his opening
sentence, “may be wondering why the picture we used on the cover of this book
is so angry and so mean looking.” Only the other day, he “had some beautiful
pictures taken” — pictures like the one that bedizens The Art of the Deal — in
which he “looked like a very nice person”; and Trump’s family implored him to
pick one of those. But no. He wanted to look like a very sour person to reflect
the “anger and unhappiness that I feel.”
So Donald Trump
offered himself to America on July 21 as the righteous spokesperson for an America
— especially non-rich white male working-class America — that has seen its
economic position systematically destroyed by the country’s
de-industrialization and its social position ridiculed by decades of
Left-leaning propaganda in academe and the mainstream media that its attitudes
towards women and people of color are “politically incorrect.” He came across
as the scourge of all the forces that are tormenting the decent working-class
white men who built this country, and — without specifics — said that he alone,
by the sheer force of his personality and will, could make it all better for
them.
At times he came
off like an Old Testament prophet issuing scathing attacks on the
“Establishment” of their day. At other times, especially when he started talking
about Mexicans and Muslims, he sounded like Adolf Hitler. At still other times
— most noticeably when he started making weird little gestures to ask the crowd
to stop cheering or chanting so he could continue his speech — he looked less
like the real Hitler than like Charlie Chaplin’s parody, “Adenoid Hynkel, the
Fuhi of Tomania,” in his 1940 film The Great Dictator. In the middle of Trump’s most blatantly racist
tirade of his entire speech, my husband Charles remembered the scene in The
Great Dictator in which the microphones
themselves recoil at the ferocity of Hynkel’s blast — and the urbane-voiced
official translator who’s rendering Chaplin’s vaudeville-German double-speak in
English politely says, “The Fuhi has just made reference to the Jewish people.”
Perhaps the most
interesting part of Trump’s 78-minute speech was the way it ended. Somebody on his staff must have told him it couldn’t be all gloom-and-doom. Someone remembered how Ronald Reagan
in 1980 had ended his big
convention speech with soaring rhetoric about America being a “shining city on
the hill” whose best days were ahead of it, not behind it. The end of Trump’s
speech contained a few phrases that apparently were intended to create a
similar sense of uplift — but his heart wasn’t in it. Every time his script
gave him something more or less optimistic, he immediately undercut it with yet
another jab at Hillary Clinton or the Democrats in general or just about
anybody from the long, long list of people he doesn’t like.
And Trump’s far
greater comfort with the role of attack dog than inspirer-in-chief came roaring
back the next day, when he responded to Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas), the last
man standing in the primary battle against him, who had said in his own
convention speech July 20 that Republicans should “vote your conscience” and
concentrate on winning the down-ballot elections for Senate, House and state
government. Trump not only said he wouldn’t accept Cruz’s endorsement if Cruz
offered it, he renewed one of his most scurrilous attacks on Cruz from the
primary campaign, suggesting that Cruz’s father had known Lee Harvey Oswald,
President Kennedy’s alleged assassin. His source was a photo published in the National
Enquirer — and Trump got in yet another
insult against legitimate journalists, one of his favorite targets, saying that
the Enquirer should be winning
Pulitzer Prizes for its exposés.
It’s easy to
write Donald Trump off as a pathetic buffoon — but then a lot of German
liberals and progressives in the 1920’s and early 1930’s who should have known
better wrote off Adolf Hitler as a buffoon, too. Trump is not Hitler; despite
some similarities — the egomania, the racism, the warmongering and the bizarre
fanaticism they’ve been able to induce in their followers — a Trump-governed America
would look a lot different from Hitler-governed Germany. But Trump has shown an
astonishing instinct for “reading” the mood of white working-class male America
and getting millions of people who’ve been reinforced in their bigotry and
prejudice by talk radio and Fox News to put him at the edge of winning a
Presidential election.
After his
convention speech the sound system at the Republican convention played three
really peculiar song choices: Free’s “All Right Now,” the Rolling Stones’ “You
Can’t Always Get What You Want,” and Elton John’s “I’m Still Standing.” After a
convention whose theme had been “Make America Great Again,” it seemed odd — to
say the least — that all the songs were by British bands, and that “All Right
Now” was a song about a sexual pickup and “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”
(one of my all-time favorite Stones songs because of its world-weariness) a song whose moral is, “You can’t always get
what you want/But if you try sometime, you just might find/You get what you
need.” Was Donald Trump trying to tell us that Hillary Clinton was who we
wanted but he was what we needed?
When Barack
Obama was nominated for President by the Democrats in 2008, the slogan his
crowds chanted was, “¡Si se puede!” — “Yes,
we can!” When Donald Trump was nominated by the Republicans eight years later,
their slogan was not “Yes, we can!” but “Yes, he will!” Likewise when Ronald
Reagan used the phrase “make America great again” in his 1980 campaign, he
prefaced it with “Let’s” — implying, as Obama did, that the task of bringing
America the change it was seeking was everybody’s, not just his. But Trump’s
slogans say he will do it all. What
we’re being called on to do is simply to stand on the sidelines and not get in
his way as he personally, through
the sheer force and triumph of his will, makes America whatever he means by “great
again.”
